I.ii.Etymological History of Sentiment and Its Inw...
An etymological inquiry of the word “sentiment”in the direction to its theatrical relation with textual medium would help to understand how it was an external entity to obtain a somatic existence as a placeholder of modern individual interiority or subjectivity.It remains useful to bear in mind the moment of textual engendering in the history of female subject as illustrated by Nancy Armstrong, a point that will be touched upon regarding aesthetics throughout the current writing.The word “sentiment”and its cognates, the vocabulary of sentience, that is, revolve around the distinction between body, mind, and soul.It “alludes to process(how one senses), power(the capacity or delicacy of the senses), and product(the impressions produced by or the results of thinking and feeling)”(Festa 17), as Lynn Festa writes.In the middle of the eighteenth century, a significant semantic shift occurred to this vocabulary of sentiment.Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines “sentiment”as “thought, notion, opinion”and rather awkwardly as “the sense considered distinctly from the language or things; a striking sentence in a composition.”It is more about the “product”part, extraneous to either the process or the sentient power that brings it into being at the first place.The second entry of Johnson’s explicitly states that it is a perception disjoined from words or objects.The lexicographer Johnson does not trouble himself to explain either what makes a sentence striking(and thereby has given the sentence “in a composition”rhetoric power) or what possible affective modes of the subject could originate from the “thought, notion, opinion.”Lynn Festa regards Johnsonian “sentiment”as “a portmanteau for discrete and self-contained notions, aloof from the messiness of the senses and even the looseness of language”(19).It is not loaded with any tenuous process or effect of the inward affect.Rather its being “discrete and self-contained”entities ensures a freedom of movements between words, objects and bodies, the historical context of which agrees with Adela Pinch’s argument[25].One can discern a similar property in Johnson’s definition of emotion:“disturbance of mind; vehemence of passion, or pleasing or painful.”This is more about the intensity of movements and what this does to the mind(not the heart) than any specific affect like envy, irritation, anxiety or paranoia.It stays with the classical etymological origin of the word “emotion,”which “stems from the Latin, e + movere,”originally meaning “‘to move out,’ ‘to migrate,’ or ‘to transport an object[26].’”Thus what Julie Ellison’s terminology of “the itinerary of feeling”(1) would almost appear tautological in that historical period.Raymond Williams traces it right when defining “sentiment”as used for “physical feeling”and “both opinion and emotion”from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries(Williams 1976:281).The adjective “physical”appends a descriptive limiter to feeling, opinion and emotion, which are natural, tangible and concrete.The affective or subjective self is still in motion and intersubjective.Through the eighteenth century sentiment begins to be more closely associated with sensibility, leaning more to the process and power of feelings.Or, to use Williams’ words:“a conscious openness to feelings, and also a conscious consumption of feelings”(281).It may not be exaggerating to rephrase it as “a conspicuous consumption of feelings,”to appropriate twentieth-century American economist Thorstein Veblen’s concept on economics[27].At least a conspicuous consumption of the “sentimental,”at least for some people.Raymond Williams quotes a Lady Bradshaugh in 1749:“[S]entimental, so much in vogue among the polite ….Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word … a sentimental man … a sentimental party … a sentimental walk”(qtd.in Williams 1976:281).
Indeed, feeling was such a compelling subject central to both aesthetics and social experience that Samuel Johnson regards that attempts “to trace the passions to their sources”constituted “the fashionable study[28]”of his time.In Jeremy Bentham’s 1781 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation[29], “sensibility”appears such an important factor to consider that Bentham lists thirty-two categories of causes that will affect different circumstances, hence influence sensibility, and therefore call for specific gradations of penal punishment.On this list there are such items as “moral sensibility,”“religious sensibility,”“sympathetic sensibility,”“sympathetic biases,”“antipathetic sensibility,”“antipathetic biases,”“connexions in the way of sympathy,”“connexions in the way of antipathy[30].”Several decades later, the French literary critic Hippolyte Taine detects in the writings of Defoe, Addison, and Steele as the inward and reflective turn in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise(1864):
Two features are common and proper to [these books].All these novels are character novels.Englishmen, more reflective than others, more inclined to the melancholy pleasure of concentrated attention and inner examination, find around them human medals more vigorously struck, less worn by friction with the world, whose uninjured face is more visible than that of others.(qtd.in Warner 28)
Nevertheless, it is not painted yet as against either Bentham or Taine who feel “too much”or those who “indulge their emotions.”The conservative poet Robert Southey’s “the sentimental classes, persons of ardent or morbid sensibility”in 1823(qtd.in Williams 1976:282) have not come into historical beings yet.This mode of excess in sensibility and its integrated necessity of cleansing have to wait till the coming of a considerable saturation of mass media, including a mature division of labour in the writing technology[31].
The eighteenth-century story is an “Age of Sensibility,”to use a label well defined by Northrop Frye several decades ago[32].The era of sensibility, sometimes, is extended from the end of the seventeenth century into the beginning of the nineteenth[33].Jerome McGann argues that the term “sensibility”clings to the early decades of the eighteenth century while “sentiment”has attached itself to a second, later phase.McGann wants to keep sensibility “the more primitive of the two,”which affiliated with instinct and the body.Sentimentality is elevated to “a sophisticated acquirement, a sympathetic understanding gained through complex acts of conscious attention and reflection”(McGann 1996:7-8, 63).For Julie Ellison, sensibility as a cultural ethos manifests itself earlier than we think.Its first appearance was probably in the late seventeenth-century civic prestige and mutual friendship practiced by men of equally high social status.With a key historical shift occurring around 1713, it became from then of “transactions between socially equal persons toward scenarios of inequality”(Ellison 6, 9).Ellison does not see any significant difference between sensibility in the first half of the century and Adam Smith’s “moral sentiment”later on[34].Janet Todd identifies sentimental literature’s heyday as the period from 1740 to 1770.For her, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments was the “end to a line of British moral philosophy”that admitted “the sentimental aim of trying systematically to link morality and emotion”(27).The discourse of sentiment and sensibility seemed to have passed what Foucault would call a “threshold of epistemologization[35]”in the middle of the eighteenth century.Its cognates, for instance emotion, begin to allude to “specific affect originating from within”(Festa 29).Another critic Amelie Oksenberg Rorty argues that during the period from Descartes to Rousseau, emotions change from “reactions to invasions from something external to the self”into “the very activities of the mind, its own motions … and along with desires, the beginnings of actions”(qtd.in Festa 19).Similarly, the waywardness and vagrancy of English feelings turns inward, more integrated into the body with its association of the process and the power.The 1783 revision of Chambers’s 1728 Cyclopaedia explicitly articulates this change:
[T]he word sentiment, in its true and old English sense, signifies a formed opinion, notion, or principle; but of late years, it has been much used by some writers to denote an internal impulse of passion, affection, fancy, or intellect, which is to be considered rather as the cause or occasion of our forming an opinion, than as the real opinion itself.(qtd.in Festa 19)(https://www.daowen.com)
Sentiment becomes more associated with sensibility in its modern use of awareness and the ability to feel[36].Through the middle of the eighteenth century, its social currency may have been experiencing a great change in the economy of its concept, analyses, and demonstrations.In the middle of the century, David Hume defines sympathy as the means by which sentiments were communicated, and “the psychological and emotive transaction which placed them at the heart of social life”(Chandler 2009:22):
No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.(Hume 1978:316)
By the end of the century, sensibility becomes the capacity to feel and transact sympathy.According to The Monthly Magazine, it was “that peculiar structure, or habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected, by surrounding objects and passing events[37].”This discursive phenomenon complicates itself with several realms that seem disparate for decades.G.S.Rousseau suggests this into a list of issues:
[T]he cults of melancholy, hypochondria as a national institution, the “English Malady,”as Cheyne called it, Richardson’s novel of sentiment, later on the well-formed and mature “man of feeling,”Sterne’s bizarre variations and subtle alterations on this theme, the eighteenth century’s eventual attack on all forms of sentiment as fake.(Rousseau 151)[38]
The current writing situates the proliferation and inward turn of sentiment and sensibility in a period when literature “moved from a reptilian Classicism, all cold and dry reason, to a mammalian Romanticism, all warm and wet feeling[39].”The transitional period from the rhetorical and scribal culture into a modern textual media culture of the eighteenth century witnessed “the decisive popular fusion of sensibility and taste,”and “the emotional susceptibility was allied to aesthetic expression”(Ellison 6).It is not an exaggeration to argue that sensibility constitutes the emergent “science of man”—“human passions”David Hume—from the late seventeenth century through the British Enlightenment and beyond[40].